26 ms·

Rejecting a candidate for over-qualification results in age bias

644 points by KentBeck 9y ago

Anechoic 9y ago
When we talk about "disparate impact" in racism, this is the type of think we're referring to. Yeah, you clean-shaven policy seems fair, but but disproportionally affects a certain segment of the population. Similarly "you over-qualified for this positions" seems fair, it may even seem like you're doing the applicant a favor, but if it disproportionally affects a particular community, perhaps it's time to reflect on it. edit: spelling, thx icelander, and damn you autocorrect
- icelancer 9y ago
  Do you mean "disparate impact?"
  - slg 9y ago
    A policy has disparate impact if it is not intentionally or directly discriminatory, but it disproportionately harms a protected group. A random example might be to require that all employees are at least 6 feet tall. That isn't inherently discriminatory against a protected class so it might appear legal at first look. However it results in disparate impact because women are much less likely to satisfy the requirement than men. It could therefore be ruled discriminatory if the business could not prove why the height requirement was a necessity for the job.
    - derefr 9y ago
      The parent was correcting the GP's typo, not asking what they meant.
      - wu_tang_chris 9y ago
        maybe so, but i found it helpful
      - slg 9y ago
        Yep, you are right. I read that quickly as "What do you mean" and not "Do you mean". Oops.
- gras 9y ago
  Who decides what is disproportional? This seems like "equality of outcome"-thinking. Do you believe in Marxism?
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  "Disparate Impact" is not about fairness. It is about non-arbitrariness. Factors that are demonstrably job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity are considered a suitable legal defense.
  - gxs 9y ago
    Agree - in this case I don't think it would be hard to find some study somewhere that supports the idea that experienced workers attrition at a higher rate than average when placed in junior positions. You might question the validity of the study, but it appears there is enough information out there to make a case.
- golergka 9y ago
  I want to understand your reasoning better. If a policy is fair, but disproportionally affects a certain segment of the population - is it bad? Why? The whole reasoning as to why exactly racism and ageism is bad, in my opinion, doesn't have to be based on morals, IMO (since everybody has different morals). It's sufficient to base it on self-interest: in an ideal simulation, where there would be bazillions of employers competing over bazillions of employees and vice versa, racist and ageist agents would lose, because they wouldn't make optimal decisions. (Of course, ideal simulation isn't real world, and that's why we have anti-monopoly and other laws that help to make the system run as if there were a bazillion rational agents). But if some rational decision making merely correlates to segments of the population, and is not directly based on information such as race or age, I fail to see what is bad about it and why it should be avoided.
  - pc86 9y ago
    It is fair if it is relevant to the job. If the legitimate requirements of a job happen to negatively affect a sector of the population that's not necessarily a problem (think firefighters being able to move a certain amount of weight in a certain amount of time). If it's completely arbitrary - everyone needs to be clean-shaven every day - and disproportionately affects a certain protected class, you could have issues.
    - golergka 9y ago
      I'm completely with you right until the phrase "and disproportionately affects a certain protected class". What's a protected class and how does it differ from any other class?
      - pc86 9y ago
        Protected class is what you can't fire/refuse to hire someone for. Race, religion, etc. You can refuse to hire people who don't wear a suit to an interview. "People who don't wear suits to interviews" is certainly a class, but not protected. You can't refuse to hire black people, because race is a protected class.
taprun 9y ago
What is results in is an organization without a focus on hiring the best people. Do this for long enough and your company will die.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  The population mostly is what it is, so there ought to be companies and jobs designed for people who aren't elite. McDonald's doesn't focus on hiring the best possible worker, they focus on hiring conscientious workers who are at the appropriate point in their career/life that it's a good fit.
  - expertentipp 9y ago
    McDonald's grade tech is going to impact our brains the same as MsDonald's food is impacting our physical health.
  - shill 9y ago
    The problem is that many interviewers don't know how to suss out a good engineer. So they just ask questions that Google and Amazon ask. And that's why you spend half of your interview pre-optimizing contrived algorithms down to O(n) when the probability of the startup ever running code at scale is very small.
- Buttons840 9y ago
  I'm currently working at a startup where we have a few developer in their 40's or maybe 50's (not sure how old some of them are really), but what I see is that the market and investors are rewarding us for "moving fast with broken things". For example, we have no plan for handling unicode, and when things break people just try random mixes of encoding, decoding, dropping characters, etc, until the thing works this one time. Subtle issues like this go deep in our system, and yet it apparently looks good to our investors and customers. We get out the features they need quickly, but people will be cursing our names for decades because of the technical debt we create. Maybe this is just because of my current situation, but it seems like the market rewards energetic programmers who can hack something together and constantly monitor and fix little bugs by hand any hour day or night. If this is what the market is rewarding then it seems legitimate to hire a bunch of cheap, young, energetic developers instead of more experienced developers.
jokoon 9y ago
Employers constantly tell me "Your resume looks great, you have a lot of skills, so why is there a gap in those years? What were you doing? Don't you have any experience in technology X or Y? You might get bored here". I never get hired.
- komali2 9y ago
  Next time this happens, I recommend trying to find the root cause. "I appreciate your concern - may I ask what experience has led you to believe someone with my qualifications would appear bored? From my perspective, I've only applied and kept in the hiring process to this point because I am interested in the long term." It's very likely they've got some other reason, and you can then clarify when they give you the "real reason" or adjust your process/resume/story for future applications with that information.
  - gxs 9y ago
    You'd be surprised - depending on the type of employer, many will not indulge any questions about any hiring decisions. Granted, if they are providing reasoning already up front (we think you may be bored), it's fair game to ask, but I don't think I've ever seen someone get a response when asking these types of questions.
    - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
      I have asked these questions in interviews like these and truly -- I get straight-up blatantly illegal discriminatory answers based on age and experience level. It's as though these interviewers have no idea that we have laws against discrimination in the US, and I'm guessing because they are not properly trained in hiring practices/we just don't hold companies accountable for discrimination like we should. This has happened to me four times in the past year alone. Even worse, it has happened to my over 40, African American friend and colleague many more times than that in the past year even though he has a CS degree and experience in teaching code with modern languages. He can't get a dev job, despite his ability to code and teach it and document it well. He's a published writer to boot. They always ask him in interviews why he has not worked as a dev (outside his own projects) at a company... why has he only taught coding? Of course the unvoiced answer goes a little something like this: "well, because companies tend to hire devs according to what is more politely known as "culture-fit", and I just don't seem to "fit the current culture", if you know what I mean." He just needs a job, any job, working in his field or adjacent to it in any way. For three years, he has looked as though it was his more-than-full-time job. (of course then the question is-- what have you been doing outside these side-projects and the unspoken answer is: "interviewing, if I get lucky enough to get an interview, with anyone who will hire me every waking moment of the past three years, when I'm not doing side-projects to make it look like I'm doing something time-consuming and deep and meaningful for no money." He went through his savings doing side-projects and applying to jobs. He's about to be homeless. He recently went after technical writing positions instead of dev roles hoping the age and race thing would be less of an issue. It was ridiculous: he applied at a well-known hosting company for a tech writer job. They put him through his paces with a take home of ridiculous scope/length (for free, as you do). He politely and squarely nailed it. They wrote him back telling him he didn't get to advance because he made a mistake in his directions and they didn't do what he said they did. This was outrageously incorrect. It makes a person want to scream. Instead of being outraged and screaming out the window like in the movie Network, he wrote them back in the most gracious way possible and explained how he understood how their mistake can easily get made by anyone, (not really, but ok, he was being nice) and why his direction was in fact correct and that as a result, he hoped to meet them in person soon, as he was eager to discuss "how he could help over at XYZ" or similar. (this after two phone interviews with them worried he might be overqualified for an associate role there, during which he assured him that the pay would be great, and that he's be happy to write documentation at any level and help in any way he could--). Well, guess what? They wrote back to thank him for alerting them to their ridiculous error, stating that they would change the assignment for future candidates based upon his gracious and clear suggestions (pretty much the definition of his effective technical writing helping them at their company right there). They then explained that he didn't do some other piddling aspect of the writing that if it were an actual compaint, could be solved by a team conversation on preferences. (but the crit was actually untrue in a concrete way, just like the above) Anyway, they let him know that they would not be inviting him to the on-site. Neither one of us can get hired anywhere despite multiple degrees and experience in engineering and in other fields. We are both over 40 and unemployable. Can't get jobs at Trader Joe's bagging groceries (and other unskilled labor, yes- have tried very hard)... overqualified, you see. Maybe we should try for a job in neurosurgery? Neither one of us has experience in that field...
egwor 9y ago
I've been interviewing quite a few people for roles and more recently there have been far more who have PhD's in Machine Learning. I point out that role won't use these skills/expert knowledge, and ask what they think. No one ever says that the role is not for them but you know that if there were a machine learning role open they'd jump at it, thereby costing the company money in rehiring. It is a tough decision.
- mrkurt 9y ago
  What do they tell you they think? Do you reject them? I don't know many people who'd jump out of a good job for one that's more closely related to their school work.
  - dvtv75 9y ago
    Agreed - that last bit's the key: if you have a good workplace, and people like being there, then it's a lot less likely that they'll jump ship. If you have a poor workplace, then it doesn't matter if you have overqualified staff or not, they'll all go.
  - Jach 9y ago
    My own response would honestly be "That's fine, I like learning new things and want to be broad too.". I don't have a PhD, just a BS in CE, but even if I had a Masters or higher I'm not going to jump at a job to do hardware development, or radar applications, just because of my academic experience. What I work on is much less important than who I'm working with and how we're working.
- wwweston 9y ago
  The news that there are apparently people with PhDs in Machine Learning who are finding the job market difficult enough they're applying for unrelated technical positions seems like it runs counter to the conventional narrative about high demand and trouble finding truly qualified scientists...
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
gras 9y ago
Why should I partake in moral outrage here? What makes this any worse than prefering younger employees at supermarkets because they can be paid less and are easier to control, even though they don't do as much useful work per capita?
xchaotic 9y ago
In the end if don't want to hire you, they won't. Now, rather than being brutally honest, they invent ways around it.
- geofft 9y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. If they don't want to hire you, they're less likely to, but at some point it might not be worth the effort to come up with an excuse. And, importantly for an organization, "they" might be a subset of people. If I have a biased coworker (where "biased" can be anything, but let's go with age for now) who doesn't want to hire someone, but can't communicate their dislike in email without putting animus towards a protected class in writing, and the rest of the team is mildly positive, the fact that they couldn't be brutally honest is probably enough to go from a no-hire (via the coworker's veto) to a hire.
  - dvtv75 9y ago
    It is, in my experience, absolutely correct. About a decade back, I applied for a job in Dunedin. The manager of it met me, read my resume and loved it - I had plenty of experience where the other applicant he was interviewing didn't have any, he said, and queried what I knew about this and that, so on. He couldn't have been more positive. Then he asked if I had any medical problems, I told him I have a disability. The red started at his collar and worked his way up to his face. He made a point of going back to my resume, and loudly shouted at me for not having any relevant experience, how I'd fking wasted his time and he was going to bill me for it, that he was going to lay a formal complaint with the employment agency I had gone through. He lied through is teeth about their work for the city council, that he "ran the computer systems for them, all the servers," and that he didn't have time to teach me how computers worked, that I only had an academic qualification with no real world experience. (I knew a guy who was loosely involved with ITS for the DCC at the time, and he told me the interviewer is a liar, most of their IT support was in-house or specialist software support.) The interviewer also told me that I should get "real world experience running a corporate network," and he told me I could do that by stealing old computers and pirating Windows ("Well, there are ways to get Windows.") A few years later, I ran into a friend of mine from university who, it turned out, had got the job I missed out on. He was just out of university when they hired him, and actually had no experience in any roles of any sort. tl;dr: The interviewer lied to my face. It hindsight, it was obvious that he did, but at the time I didn't get it. (Part of the disability, I'm very easily lied to.) He made up every excuse under the sun to not hire me, or even continue with the interview. It would have been much less obvious (to an outsider) if he'd just concluded the interview normally, without any further comments on the disability and I wouldn't have been any the wiser, but he was too stupid and self-righteous for that. (Further thought, when I found out about it, I mentioned it to a friend of mine who immediately told me that the employer had every right to discriminate against me on the basis of my disability, and nothing could convince him otherwise - not even the government, who stated that had I found out sooner and been able to prove it, I would have likely received a large cash settlement.)
calt 9y ago
After my dad's manufacturing related engineering position moved overseas he got told by an automaker that he was over-qualified for line work. However no one was interested in his engineering skills even after he tried to pivot to quality-control engineering. The pay and work at the automaker would have been great for him. Instead he ended up carrying mail until retirement. I constantly think about him and remind myself to not get to comfortable in an industry.
- expertentipp 9y ago
  When I hear about getting too cosy in an automotive industry my brain screams "modern day Germany".
  - Grollicus 9y ago
    Why is that? Automotive in Germany is generally a high pressure high turnaround job. If you're not at one of the big car manufacturers themseves chances are your employer has closed in 10 years, or fired 50% of their employees or something ridiculous like hat. Additionally, nowadays you don't get hired by car manufacturers but by third party companies that loan their workers to them. In the lower levels (factory work) there is some pushback against that, but in the higher levels its generally accepted
- senatorobama 9y ago
  > I constantly think about him and remind myself to not get to comfortable in an industry. What are the practical outcomes of this? Side projects?
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Keep learning new things. If you can't think of something substantial you've learned in the last year, switch something up. Start a company, give some talks, or switch jobs and industries if you have to.
  - baxtr 9y ago
    Unsorted list of things you could do: Grow your network, read books and learn new stuff, get jobs with great sounding titles, get jobs, where you are exposed to key stakeholders in your industry, give talks, setup a „coffee date“ every other week (meet people for 30min, don’t ask for a job, just mention you’re always interested in oppurtunities to grow, they will reach out to you when something opens up).
salqadri 9y ago
This doesn't happen just because of age. While I was living in Canada, I met plenty of highly-qualified immigrants desperately looking for jobs, and would routinely get this response even though they weren't old or anything; its just that they would literally be applying for low-skill jobs because the appropriate jobs would not take them for lack of "Canadian Experience".
- jpatokal 9y ago
  This is a thing in Australia as well, and it's quite baffling. As far as I can tell, it's not even racism or genuine comms concerns etc, it's just that any work experience outside Australia gets discounted as "not real work".
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >>it's not even racism >>work experience outside Australia gets discounted as "not real work". I mean, that might not be the strict definition of racism, but it essentially is.
    - derefr 9y ago
      This is still true even when the people getting discounted are of the same race and culture as the interviewer, though. Like, hospitals seemingly don't want doctors that grew up in the US but then studied medicine at foreign universities—even when those universities are world-renowned for producing great doctors. Unless you're suggesting that such places think that the foreign culture "contaminated" their own countrymen in the few years they were abroad—and made them useless—a different explanation is needed for this effect.
      - dpark 9y ago
        If you discount the quality of a degree from a well-regarded university just because it’s in a foreign country, it’s racist (or xenophobic or something roughly equivalent). Not against the candidate but against (citizens of) the nation hosting the university. With that said, I think hospitals want American candidates with degrees from American universities because the concern is that an American educated by a university in another country was perhaps unable to gain acceptance to an American school, in which case perhaps the foreign university isn’t actually as selective.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
The "traditional understanding" of getting an applicant to your job that is over qualified is that they are just trying to get a paycheck while they look for something better. I put that in quotes because yes, I've seen it also result in an age bias and as I went from one side of the equation to the other, I spent some time evaluating what was and was not important to me as an employee. About 15 years ago I came to the conclusion that "over qualified" was never a legitimate disqualifying disposition of a candidate. Simply put, if you are applying for a job that needs less skills than you bring and are willing to take the salary that is offered, how far 'beyond' the requirements you go is irrelevant. I asked a hiring manager at Google once if they would tell a sales guy "No I don't want the Ferrari at the same price as this Mazda Miata, its more sports car than I need to get around." Even if you never expect to challenge the top end of the sports car you probably won't turn it down. Similarly with employees, if you are up front with them about what the job entails and they are ok with it, who are you to say they will be "bored" or "twiddling their thumbs all day" ? Answer is, you aren't. Hire them and get get a discount on skilz they are offering you. Your company will be better for it.
- trhway 9y ago
  >"No I don't want the Ferrari at the same price as this Mazda Miata, its more sports car than I need to get around." Even if you never expect to challenge the top end of the sports car you probably won't turn it down. Ferrari comes with very high maintenance costs, well beyond what regular Miata buyer can comfortably afford. (note: age/experience wise i'm probably close to the "Ferrari" myself :)
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    That is true with the analogy. I personally haven't seen a correlation between qualification fit and maintenance challenges for employees but it sounds like enraged_camel has had different experiences. What I'm trying to tease apart are which are issues the manager causes and which are ones an over qualified employee would cause.
  - madmulita 9y ago
    In that case, the problem is not overqualification, the problem is that the person is high maintenance.
shove 9y ago
I received some advice to omit the first 5-ish years positions from my resume and “reword” the line referring to my 20 years of industry experience. I'm older than my boss and it's definitely a bit scary. YMMV
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  What was the relationship between you and the person who gave that advice?
  - shove 9y ago
    I was laid off and one of the severance benefits was a job placement / interview coaching service
- kvonhorn 9y ago
  I recently created a custom resume for a recruiter who wanted me to remove my pre-2006 experience from my resume before he would submit me for a contract. Boasting wide and deep experience in this industry is a liability for an employee, not an asset.
  - shove 9y ago
    Yep, I did some “filtering” as well
  - amigoingtodie 9y ago
    This is funny to me because it means 10 years of experience is the maximum any candidate should have.
- robteix 9y ago
  I did this recently. I removed the details of older experience and replaced them with a section “Other projects” where I quickly listed interesting and relevant things I did before but with no dates. I also removed the dates of my degrees. Coincidence or not, I started receiving more contacts from recruiters and recently got a great new job.
WalterBright 9y ago
When your date dumps you after the first date, the reason they give is never the truth. It's the same when they reject you for the job. There's not much of a percentage in stewing or arguing about it.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Agreed. I've heard candidates rejected as "overqualified" when they meant "not qualified or otherwise not interesting, but they seem to think a lot of themselves".
- kbart 9y ago
  Exactly. Saying "You are overqualified and would be bored to work here" is the same as saying: "You are really nice, but let's just be friends". Nobody today is going to tell you straight: "You are too old, sorry, we probably won't be able to push and exploit you and we are afraid you will find a better job".
blennon 9y ago
Now that I'm in a position of hiring technical people, this seems crazier than ever to me. It's hard to hire talented software engineers because they're so in demand. I would be glad to consider eager and talented prospective employees who I don't have to compete hard for.
alexnewman 9y ago
And people wonder why everyone goes for the startup lottery ticket
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Not sure why you were down voted here, but this is my EXACT rationale at the moment. I am a 50 year old programmer who sold his software consulting business a couple of years back. I figure the ONLY way I can stay actively programming these days is to buy a ticket in the good old "startup lottery". I've created 5 SaaS apps and around 10 mobile apps in the 3 years since I sold my business. Almost all the early ones struggled or failed completely. My current SaaS seems to be doing well, and I expect that it will see me through retirement. I guess I finally got lucky on a winning ticket :) I would expect a lot more players in this game as people age out of the software development world over the next few years.
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    it's not 6 figure, but you can go from 5 figure to 5 figure jobs with no hassle.
    - alexnewman 9y ago
      Now i just need to figure out how to work from somewhere cheap enough I guess?
  - alexnewman 9y ago
    I generally get voted down for anything I say negative. Hackernews just knows to vote down the surly.
pinewurst 9y ago
It's ironic seeing this hosted at Facebook, the land of "young people are just smarter".* *The infamous quote from Zuckerberg
- CGamesPlay 9y ago
  Well, Zuckerberg employs Beck, so he must have seen a sliver of the light at some point!
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    I misread that as "silver light" and thought it was quite a clever pun on silver haired programmers... :)
musgrove 9y ago
I'm seeing this now. I'm 48 and have applied to over 100 jobs. I have an MBA and have been well-qualified for every one of the jobs I've applied to, or else I wouldn't have wasted my time. I've had about 5 legitimate responses. I know it's not my resume, or much else. Age is just about the only answer, or not being able to afford me because I'm "over-qualified" which makes me wonder why they're advertising for the position, if they don't expect to hire a qualified candidate.
- CamelCaseName 9y ago
  Is it possible they are inflating their needs in the expectation that applicants are inflating their resumes? I am 22 and see this all the time for positions needing 1-2 years experience. Plus, it is a great way for them to offer you a wage towards the lower end of the salary range while applicants feel happy getting a title they might not deserve.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    That, or a downstream effect of people applying for jobs for which they do not quite meet the stated qualifications. Putting up "5 years experience" starts being a really good way to get ambitious people who have two or three years of experience, and so employers start using the job description to grab those applicants rather than actually-meeting-qualification. On second thought, though, it's more likely due to H1B employment requiring an "attempt" to hire a qualified domestic employee. So once an employer has an H1B they want to hire, they have to put out a job description and fail to find an acceptable candidate meeting the listed qualifications.
    - bobsman123 9y ago
      This. My company creates fraudulent postings to hire H1Bs. The Americans we interview (1 per position to follow the law) are switching industries or otherwise have absolutely no experience.
      - vpalanc1 9y ago
jondubois 9y ago
It's true that if you always do the same kind of programming work, you might get bored and this can negatively affect productivity (in terms of raw speed)... But on the plus side; your code will likely be of very high quality and will almost definitely save the company a ton of money in the medium and long term. So yeah I think that calling someone 'overqualified' is a poor excuse. Startups love code monkeys that can churn out features quickly; they're often willing to sacrifice huge medium-term benefits for small short-term benefits but that's idiotic. From my experience, it only takes about 3 to 6 months for technical debt to become a major problem so unless you expect your startup to have an exit in the next 3 months then you really should not accept any short term solutions at all.
placebo 9y ago
I don't think you can fight this with laws: We live in an age and society that prefers young over old, smart over wise, quick profits over steady growth - I could go on with the contrasts but you get the idea. This might change over time but don't hold your breath. If some of the young developers reading this realize that the same might happen to them then my suggestion would be not to wait around hoping that new employment laws will save you in a few decades (which will pass faster than you think), but to start taking care of things now. This means, make sure that by the time you get to the age when someone won't hire you, you won't need or want to be hired. You can do this by either saving enough money by that age to do whatever you want (which could be a new venture doing what you love, whether it is developing software or not) or by slowly creating a business (maybe starting as a side project) which will end up with you on the hiring side (even if you only want to hire yourself).
abiox 9y ago
i was unemployed for a while, and got a number of 'overqualified' rejections. eventually i ran out of money to pay the bills, and was a few weeks from being kicked out onto the streets... when i finally managed to land something. it was a fucking brutal roller coaster. sure is nice to have a roof over my head.
deleted 9y ago
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zappo2938 9y ago
Over-qualified people are seen as a threat. The managers who hire, unless they are the owners, do not want to deal with the office politics of someone who truly knows more than they do. If you are over-qualified for a position there is nothing wrong with playing down your resume. Writing code is a new career for me and I don't mention my previous management positions at all because I'm applying for subordinate positions framing my resume accordingly.
- 77pt77 9y ago
  How old are you?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  I had a suggestion from a friend that I should just cut off everything from my résumé that happened before 7 years ago. I have not yet tried this, but my friend just started getting calls for interviews having done this. Do you have any more advice?
  - zappo2938 9y ago
    I only put on my resume things that provide value to the potential employer. I was a chef in restaurants and on a yacht for 17 years before coding but on my resume, which is only one page, all that experience is included in 2 lines at the bottom because it doesn't show anything of value beyond my coding experience for the type of positions I was applying for. If I apply for a management position, my executive chef experience will take up a second page.
  - gjmacd 9y ago
    This is what I was told as well. I'm 52, I have huge resume of experience at some great companies (even my own company I built), the reality is, you get 10 years in, the person thinks you're his or her "Dad"... it's a little shitty, but the advice I got was to do exactly this and I started getting more responses.
mirimir 9y ago
I've never liked being an employee. And I liked it less and less, as I got older. I also started getting rejected for being overqualified (plus having a bad attitude). My solution was consulting. And eventually, consulting as a testimonial expert. Being older and overqualified helps in intimidating opposing counsel, and impressing judges and juries.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  I like this route, too, so far, though it's new for me. I did meet a 60-year-old programmer the other night who said he can't find consulting work anymore. I do sort of worry about one day not being able to keep up with contemporary techniques, but it seems like that day is far off, for now.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    I worked with a testimonial expert in his 80s, and he was getting ~1000 USD/hr.
ebfd 9y ago
Does rejecting a candidate for under-qualification not result in age bias as well?
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
"you're overqualified" and "we only hire the best" is a bit of a contradiction, isn't it?
Celarnor 9y ago
This is fascinating to see. I'm pushing 28, so every day I worry if the development job I have now will be my last. I'm a hard, dedicated, loyal worker who has never left a company, only swapping jobs when my old employers laid me off or themselves collapsed. Unfortunately, I suffer from strong social anxiety so management certainly isn't an option. When I was 22, finding a job was easy. But once you have the portfolio they say they were looking for in the first place, no one wants you anymore because they're too afraid you'll jump to the next job paying $1k a year more or whatever. Its dumb.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  I've never seen anyone reject a 28 year old as "overqualified". There's probably something else going on here, though I can't really help you with what it is. I suggest taking some of your technical friends out for some beverages of their choice and asking for some constructive criticism.
  - Celarnor 9y ago
    Most of the people I know in tech feel like they're aging out of the market. Small web/marketing agencies--the only development jobs available around here--want fresh grads for junior positions. Most of the time those are the only ones available, as there is rarely more than 1 or 2 lead/senior developers within the company. I've never heard "you're overqualified" specifically, but I lost count of how many times I heard "we can't pay what someone with your skillset is worth and don't think you'll stick around because of it" when I was unemployed between jobs #3 and my current one for 5 months, desperately applying to any and all positions that got posted, like 'website maintenance assistant', 'adwords manager', 'forms developer' and 'frontend developer'. Eventually two weeks before my unemployment would have run out, a senior java ecommerce developer position opened up, to which I currently cling with dear life. :) This might just be regional/bad job market thing, I don't know. Never lived anywhere else but Maine.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Sorry to hear all that. Unfortunately, ability to relocate might be essential in some circumstances. At least until employers are more willing to hire remote workers, assuming that happens eventually.
Celarnor 9y ago
This is fascinating to see. I'm only two years away from the cliff (30), so every day I worry if the development job I have now will be my last. I'm a hard, dedicated, loyal worker who has never left a company, only swapping jobs when my old employers laid me off or themselves collapsed. Unfortunately, I suffer from strong social anxiety so management certainly isn't an option. When I was 22, finding a job was easy. But once you have the portfolio they say they were looking for in the first place, no one wants you anymore because they're too afraid you'll jump to the next job paying $1k a year more or whatever. Its dumb.
tomrod 9y ago
Reminds me somewhat of the Gervais principle. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
pb000 9y ago
So there could be a few more possibilities why an overqualified person is willing to accept the job. Maybe a burnout if very high pace high pressure work, could nsulting including. Perhaps chilling at the slower paced company is perfect for him or her. If so why would he leave? I have known plenty of folks who a really really want to mentor and contribute their experience from decades of consulting, but not necessarily go back to doing it. Why not take advantage of the fact. Also, from the employer's perspective give him or her opportunity to do something else when the jobbia done and there's time to spare. Opensource contribution on the clock, presales tasks maybe,speaking at conferences, mentorship. Who cares as long as his job is done, he feels needed and can find other things to do to not be bored. Does not take a lot to manage a self starter.
harry8 9y ago
This person has wonderful skills and experience. They must have an extensive network of people they've worked with and for. Yet here they are in front of me not making any use of that network. Why? Meet that head on because one possibility that goes through the mind of those making the hiring decision is "Is it because this person is horrible?" "I'm here and not using my own network to get hired because (they've all retired rich the lucky bastards|the network went a bit cold while I did 15 years in xyz co.|I'm not comfortable using a network because I've always been able to get hired on my talent, skills and work ethic and that's really important to me|whatever the reason is). Also when mentioning previous stuff you've done. "Did that with Jill and Amesh, great people, would work with them again in a heartbeat." "This one I did with Kar-Wai, talented guy, I liked working with him." Hiring is an investment decision you have to live with every day. Fear and greed the same as any other, allay the fears, stoke the greed. Note this is not "The Answer" my best to all doing it a bit tough in the job market. It's just one thing to consider if you haven't already, get the box next to it ticked.
neves 9y ago
Maybe you should look in places that management is based in evidences: https://hbr.org/2010/12/the-myth-of-the-overqualified-worker https://hbr.org/2010/12/the-myth-of-the-overqualified-worker
gjmacd 9y ago
I'm 52, I recently got a "pass" on a job that matched that I was told in person that I would get an offer in writing while at my 4th and final interview with the COO/HR person (not the hiring manager). I walked out of that place thinking I had the job only to get an email from the hiring manager (CTO) telling me that "if the job was a Venn Diagram, you fit 80% of the role, I just think the other 20%, you wouldn't be happy and probably not challenged enough." I was stunned. Venn Diagram?? come on man... Seriously? And email, call and talk to me. Be an adult. At first I was like "ok, not a fit." Then I had to realize I was probably 25 years older than he was and what he was really saying was "you're too old to be working here." The tone of his email was exactly as this blog. "You're just too experienced" -- in so many words. Sucks being old... But I replied in email that he was probably right, that the role itself was a little below my level (truth) and that it was probably something I would have had to work with him on. I also identified that this guy (great guy, I liked him), was immature on the management side and every co-worker that interviewed with me confirmed it by telling me how much "he needed someone under him to do be the leader, be the buffer -- keep him focused on vision", so they needed me -- or the younger me. So I felt confident this was going to work. But he clearly felt I was too old... It's a bummer. Had they offered me the job, I would have taken it and worked through the issues and grown with them. The reality is, I was perfect for the job and they actually needed my experience and my level of software domain knowledge in this space -- they were young, struggling with execution and accountability. I came to the realization that my age was both a benefit (to the company), but a threat to the CTO (founder) as being too experienced under you which would give him a lot of insecurity, but also having a guy that was old enough to be your Dad work under you -- he couldn't handle that (probably). Personally, for me, I would have had a blast. I love working with younger people and I love the energy and I'm someone who can relate to people half my age in many ways. Not to mention, I have all the modern stack experience they needed and I'm a pretty fucking great guy for their culture. So as a 52 year old developer, I never thought I'd say this, but I'm a dinosaur and I might have to end up being a consultant or building another company (again) -- which I did when I was in my 30's and young.
b0rsuk 9y ago
As an overqualified employee, I think you should simply delete parts of your resume to appear less skilled. A job is better than no job. I wonder why more people don't do that.
- GavinMcG 9y ago
  Gaps in your employment record probably look even worse, so that means carefully underselling yourself in each position. That seems tricky, at the very least. Also, selection bias might keep those stories from being told.
  - b0rsuk 9y ago
    Not necessarily delete jobs you had. You can simplify the actual responsibilities and achievements you had. You trade potential higher salary for a higher chance of becoming employed. Later, you can ask for a rise. Disclaimer: I'm currently unemployed.
- Mz 9y ago
  Let me reframe this for you: Your resume should effectively communicate why you are qualified for this job. If you are essentially talking about being qualified to be in charge of the person with this job, you aren't really effectively communicating why they should hire you to fill this role. Both framings may result in the resume being edited down some, but the end result and positioning will likely be somewhat different. You aren't trying to downplay or hide anything. You just are trying to effectively communicate the information they need about you, no more and no less.
aryehof 9y ago
Part of the issue is that programming is largely seen today as a process of problem solving using an "agile" hack it 'till it works approach. Quick thinking to put out a fire or implement a quick feature using some new technology easily learned is most valued, along with the ability to be "flexible" when it comes to quality of work and workplace demands. Given this, one might as well look to recruit some smart, cheap and enthusiastic graduate. Sadly industry experience and lessons learned don't seem so important.
madshiva 9y ago
At my last interview, they reject me because "I'll not proper integrate with the team"
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
I had several interviews where the chief interviewer said I worry you won't want to keep doing just frontend, and I was like but if there are tickets on other parts of the stack I can do why wouldn't I - and anyway if I know parts of the backend and the data layer that means I know where a ticket should be fixed - most things can be fixed in the frontend but not everything should be. I didn't get those jobs though.
akerro 9y ago
My previous company was rejecting 95% of overqualified applications, sometimes because of their age, sometime because of number of their certifications in their CVs. There was once a time, the company was offering totally average daily wage for a contractor job, and we got a CV from a guy with almost every possible Java certification from last 15 years. We knew we can't hire him, he would be bored here and soon ask for more money, which the company didn't have.
- amorphid 9y ago
  > We knew we can't hire him, he would be bored here and soon ask for more money, which the company didn't have. I recommend giving anyone who appears minimally qualified the benefit of the doubt & see what they have to say before denying them a shot at meaningful employment. I used to run a recruiting company, and I couldn't afford to pay very much. For example, I hired my first assistant as $15/hour USD when I was paying myself $12/hour USD. This was in San Francisco, CA where a that kind of money doesn't go very far. Almost everyone I hired was overqualified, but that never seemed to matter. Before I hired anyone, I said something like... "Look, I can only afford to pay you $X, and you'll duties will be A, B, & C. You look like someone who could get a job that's half as hard & pays twice as much. Why do you really want THIS job?" If they gave what sounded like a sincere answer, I'd hire them. It was as simple as that. One of my applicants had an MBA from a fancy school and had worked in sales at a prestigious investment bank. When asked why the heck someone with that kind of background would want to do entry level office work that doesn't pay very well, the applicant plainly said, "My partner is starting a hedge fund, I help my partner with in bootstrapping the fund, I'm looking for a little extra money at a job with flexible hours, and I enjoy this kind of work." That "overqualified" applicant was hired, and turned out to be one of my best workers. When you pre-judge an applicant based on the appearance of too much experience & too many certifications, you are denying that applicant & yourself the opportunity to explore what could be an amazing employment relationship for both sides.
creatrixcordis 9y ago
Majority of managers do not want people that see through their bs. After all they need to manage. Someone who sees through their bs is not as pliable as an inexperienced hire. They want the naivety because it is exploitable just like ignorance. Remember most managers are trying to move up and if you pose a risk, they won’t have that. This is also part of the reason why there exist so many collaboration tools. If we placed collaboration above competition just maybe the company would be a better place to work. Instead of this competitive minefield where everyone is just looking for the next opportunity to step up at the expense of others and at the expense of collaboration.
- le-mark 9y ago
  These types are the easiest to game though. Just tell them what they want to hear, and deliver something occasionally. Then you're considered to be a star. Rinse, repeat.
DoubleGlazing 9y ago
I think the use of the term "over qualified" is often used to mask the real reasons for rejection. I was rejected for a job when I was aged 39 for supposedly being over qualified. When I applied for the job in question I was upfront about my experience, qualifications and desired salary which was market rate for my experience. I didn't sell myself short. The product I would be working on was unified message distribution system not too dissimilar to Twilio. After a code test, a whiteboard exam and two rounds of interviews I was told "Yeah, we really like you and you undoubtedly have the skills. But we were really looking for someone a little less qualified". I pushed a bit to find out what that meant and the HR person claimed it was my salary expectations, but I had my doubts. During both interviews I was asked if I had children. I said I had two. I was then asked their ages and where they went to school. This led on to questions about how they got to school and what happens if one or both of them are sick etc. The questioning style was casual, but they were definitely probing me. In Ireland this line of questioning is illegal, but it happens a lot. At the time I answered the questions with a feeling of reluctance. I do believe that having young children lost me the job. I was asked what would happen if my children were sick off school, I answered that either me or my wife would have to stay home. I was asked why my wife wouldn't take on that responsibility exclusively. I responded because we share our responsibilities to our family. I could see the interviewers brow furrow when I said that. I have a strong suspicion that the reason why age affects IT recruitment so much is not because of "over qualification". It's because the older you are the more likely you are to have family that you want to spend time with. Or if you don't have children you might have other interests that take priority over work. I've had managers who have straight up admitted that the older you are the less likely you are to put up with overtime and more likely to challenge over bearing bosses. Put simply younger people have fewer adult life distractions, will work longer hours and put up with more crap.
- moduspol 9y ago
  It sounds like you had expectations up front that you would be permitted to stay home from work if your kids were sick. If that's the case, it seems reasonable that your employer know about that before hiring you. They're likely asking because they've already hired people who expect to be able to come in late after taking their kids to school, work from home without notice if their kids are sick, etc. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but: To me that's reasonable employer's discretion. If they're expecting you to work after hours and probing if you have kids to gauge that, that's one thing. But I've seen coworkers get allowances for kids for all kinds of things. Both parties (employee and employer) should be aware of what the expectations are ahead of time. And if that means that I (as someone who doesn't have children, or lives near additional family who can handle those contingencies) come out as a better candidate, then that's not unreasonable.
monort 9y ago
When thinking about reasons for ageism you should account for consulting, which do not have this problem (or at least it is less pronounced). The cause is hidden in the overhead of full-time employment.
jordanpg 9y ago
Appearance matters so much in this discussion. There are 40 year-olds who are obviously 40 year-olds, complete with greying beards, burgeoning bellies, and a wardrobe consisting of nothing but polo shirts acquired from years of conference attendance. And then there are 40 year-olds who could pass for 30. My intuition is that the likelihood of ageism being subconsciously or otherwise invoked in the former case is vastly larger. In this sense, it is a lot like racism or sexism in the case of "culture" fitting. The desire to appear young and nimble, as a company, is a significant part of whatever demographic they are shooting for, outwardly.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Lol I am in my hem hem 50's some of my colleges though I was in my 30's recently :-)
unlmtd1 9y ago
Labor laws result in entrepreneurs rejecting 'over-qualified' applicants.
ausjke 9y ago
I want to buy a bag, just to hold my stuff, my budget is $100 for it, now the store has a few luxury bags for sale, but they are all above $200 price tag, what should I do? do I have to buy them? or I can decide to keep looking for better performance/price ratio? isn't over-qualify the same as too-inexperienced, that many companies are reluctant to hire? bias is part of the real world, while I'm not young anymore, I firmly support that the company has the right to hire who they want to hire, after all, it's its private money, its decision and we're not reaching communism just yet. It's the competition made USA USA.
bernardlunn 9y ago
ageism was the first ism I had to deal with personally, said the old white guy. It is bad in every industry and job sector.
odbol_ 9y ago
I've been rejected from jobs because I was over-qualified. Then I got accepted to one, which turned out later that I was over-qualified for that one too. I did get bored, I felt like the job wasn't a good match for my skills, and I went looking for a new job. So the concern is indeed very real and can cause unneeded churn for a company.
peternicky 9y ago
Can someone share a non-Facebook link please?

644 points by KentBeck 9y ago

When we talk about "disparate impact" in racism, this is the type of think we're referring to. Yeah, you clean-shaven policy seems fair, but but disproportionally affects a certain segment of the population. Similarly "you over-qualified for this positions" seems fair, it may even seem like you're doing the applicant a favor, but if it disproportionally affects a particular community, perhaps it's time to reflect on it. edit: spelling, thx icelander, and damn you autocorrect

icelancer 9y ago
Do you mean "disparate impact?"
- slg 9y ago
  A policy has disparate impact if it is not intentionally or directly discriminatory, but it disproportionately harms a protected group. A random example might be to require that all employees are at least 6 feet tall. That isn't inherently discriminatory against a protected class so it might appear legal at first look. However it results in disparate impact because women are much less likely to satisfy the requirement than men. It could therefore be ruled discriminatory if the business could not prove why the height requirement was a necessity for the job.
  - derefr 9y ago
    The parent was correcting the GP's typo, not asking what they meant.
    - wu_tang_chris 9y ago
      maybe so, but i found it helpful
    - slg 9y ago
      Yep, you are right. I read that quickly as "What do you mean" and not "Do you mean". Oops.
gras 9y ago
Who decides what is disproportional? This seems like "equality of outcome"-thinking. Do you believe in Marxism?
lr4444lr 9y ago
"Disparate Impact" is not about fairness. It is about non-arbitrariness. Factors that are demonstrably job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity are considered a suitable legal defense.
- gxs 9y ago
  Agree - in this case I don't think it would be hard to find some study somewhere that supports the idea that experienced workers attrition at a higher rate than average when placed in junior positions. You might question the validity of the study, but it appears there is enough information out there to make a case.
golergka 9y ago
I want to understand your reasoning better. If a policy is fair, but disproportionally affects a certain segment of the population - is it bad? Why? The whole reasoning as to why exactly racism and ageism is bad, in my opinion, doesn't have to be based on morals, IMO (since everybody has different morals). It's sufficient to base it on self-interest: in an ideal simulation, where there would be bazillions of employers competing over bazillions of employees and vice versa, racist and ageist agents would lose, because they wouldn't make optimal decisions. (Of course, ideal simulation isn't real world, and that's why we have anti-monopoly and other laws that help to make the system run as if there were a bazillion rational agents). But if some rational decision making merely correlates to segments of the population, and is not directly based on information such as race or age, I fail to see what is bad about it and why it should be avoided.
- pc86 9y ago
  It is fair if it is relevant to the job. If the legitimate requirements of a job happen to negatively affect a sector of the population that's not necessarily a problem (think firefighters being able to move a certain amount of weight in a certain amount of time). If it's completely arbitrary - everyone needs to be clean-shaven every day - and disproportionately affects a certain protected class, you could have issues.
  - golergka 9y ago
    I'm completely with you right until the phrase "and disproportionately affects a certain protected class". What's a protected class and how does it differ from any other class?
    - pc86 9y ago
      Protected class is what you can't fire/refuse to hire someone for. Race, religion, etc. You can refuse to hire people who don't wear a suit to an interview. "People who don't wear suits to interviews" is certainly a class, but not protected. You can't refuse to hire black people, because race is a protected class.

taprun 9y ago

What is results in is an organization without a focus on hiring the best people. Do this for long enough and your company will die.

jessriedel 9y ago
The population mostly is what it is, so there ought to be companies and jobs designed for people who aren't elite. McDonald's doesn't focus on hiring the best possible worker, they focus on hiring conscientious workers who are at the appropriate point in their career/life that it's a good fit.
- expertentipp 9y ago
  McDonald's grade tech is going to impact our brains the same as MsDonald's food is impacting our physical health.
- shill 9y ago
  The problem is that many interviewers don't know how to suss out a good engineer. So they just ask questions that Google and Amazon ask. And that's why you spend half of your interview pre-optimizing contrived algorithms down to O(n) when the probability of the startup ever running code at scale is very small.
Buttons840 9y ago
I'm currently working at a startup where we have a few developer in their 40's or maybe 50's (not sure how old some of them are really), but what I see is that the market and investors are rewarding us for "moving fast with broken things". For example, we have no plan for handling unicode, and when things break people just try random mixes of encoding, decoding, dropping characters, etc, until the thing works this one time. Subtle issues like this go deep in our system, and yet it apparently looks good to our investors and customers. We get out the features they need quickly, but people will be cursing our names for decades because of the technical debt we create. Maybe this is just because of my current situation, but it seems like the market rewards energetic programmers who can hack something together and constantly monitor and fix little bugs by hand any hour day or night. If this is what the market is rewarding then it seems legitimate to hire a bunch of cheap, young, energetic developers instead of more experienced developers.

jokoon 9y ago

Employers constantly tell me "Your resume looks great, you have a lot of skills, so why is there a gap in those years? What were you doing? Don't you have any experience in technology X or Y? You might get bored here". I never get hired.

komali2 9y ago
Next time this happens, I recommend trying to find the root cause. "I appreciate your concern - may I ask what experience has led you to believe someone with my qualifications would appear bored? From my perspective, I've only applied and kept in the hiring process to this point because I am interested in the long term." It's very likely they've got some other reason, and you can then clarify when they give you the "real reason" or adjust your process/resume/story for future applications with that information.
- gxs 9y ago
  You'd be surprised - depending on the type of employer, many will not indulge any questions about any hiring decisions. Granted, if they are providing reasoning already up front (we think you may be bored), it's fair game to ask, but I don't think I've ever seen someone get a response when asking these types of questions.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    I have asked these questions in interviews like these and truly -- I get straight-up blatantly illegal discriminatory answers based on age and experience level. It's as though these interviewers have no idea that we have laws against discrimination in the US, and I'm guessing because they are not properly trained in hiring practices/we just don't hold companies accountable for discrimination like we should. This has happened to me four times in the past year alone. Even worse, it has happened to my over 40, African American friend and colleague many more times than that in the past year even though he has a CS degree and experience in teaching code with modern languages. He can't get a dev job, despite his ability to code and teach it and document it well. He's a published writer to boot. They always ask him in interviews why he has not worked as a dev (outside his own projects) at a company... why has he only taught coding? Of course the unvoiced answer goes a little something like this: "well, because companies tend to hire devs according to what is more politely known as "culture-fit", and I just don't seem to "fit the current culture", if you know what I mean." He just needs a job, any job, working in his field or adjacent to it in any way. For three years, he has looked as though it was his more-than-full-time job. (of course then the question is-- what have you been doing outside these side-projects and the unspoken answer is: "interviewing, if I get lucky enough to get an interview, with anyone who will hire me every waking moment of the past three years, when I'm not doing side-projects to make it look like I'm doing something time-consuming and deep and meaningful for no money." He went through his savings doing side-projects and applying to jobs. He's about to be homeless. He recently went after technical writing positions instead of dev roles hoping the age and race thing would be less of an issue. It was ridiculous: he applied at a well-known hosting company for a tech writer job. They put him through his paces with a take home of ridiculous scope/length (for free, as you do). He politely and squarely nailed it. They wrote him back telling him he didn't get to advance because he made a mistake in his directions and they didn't do what he said they did. This was outrageously incorrect. It makes a person want to scream. Instead of being outraged and screaming out the window like in the movie Network, he wrote them back in the most gracious way possible and explained how he understood how their mistake can easily get made by anyone, (not really, but ok, he was being nice) and why his direction was in fact correct and that as a result, he hoped to meet them in person soon, as he was eager to discuss "how he could help over at XYZ" or similar. (this after two phone interviews with them worried he might be overqualified for an associate role there, during which he assured him that the pay would be great, and that he's be happy to write documentation at any level and help in any way he could--). Well, guess what? They wrote back to thank him for alerting them to their ridiculous error, stating that they would change the assignment for future candidates based upon his gracious and clear suggestions (pretty much the definition of his effective technical writing helping them at their company right there). They then explained that he didn't do some other piddling aspect of the writing that if it were an actual compaint, could be solved by a team conversation on preferences. (but the crit was actually untrue in a concrete way, just like the above) Anyway, they let him know that they would not be inviting him to the on-site. Neither one of us can get hired anywhere despite multiple degrees and experience in engineering and in other fields. We are both over 40 and unemployable. Can't get jobs at Trader Joe's bagging groceries (and other unskilled labor, yes- have tried very hard)... overqualified, you see. Maybe we should try for a job in neurosurgery? Neither one of us has experience in that field...

egwor 9y ago

I've been interviewing quite a few people for roles and more recently there have been far more who have PhD's in Machine Learning. I point out that role won't use these skills/expert knowledge, and ask what they think. No one ever says that the role is not for them but you know that if there were a machine learning role open they'd jump at it, thereby costing the company money in rehiring. It is a tough decision.

mrkurt 9y ago
What do they tell you they think? Do you reject them? I don't know many people who'd jump out of a good job for one that's more closely related to their school work.
- dvtv75 9y ago
  Agreed - that last bit's the key: if you have a good workplace, and people like being there, then it's a lot less likely that they'll jump ship. If you have a poor workplace, then it doesn't matter if you have overqualified staff or not, they'll all go.
- Jach 9y ago
  My own response would honestly be "That's fine, I like learning new things and want to be broad too.". I don't have a PhD, just a BS in CE, but even if I had a Masters or higher I'm not going to jump at a job to do hardware development, or radar applications, just because of my academic experience. What I work on is much less important than who I'm working with and how we're working.
wwweston 9y ago
The news that there are apparently people with PhDs in Machine Learning who are finding the job market difficult enough they're applying for unrelated technical positions seems like it runs counter to the conventional narrative about high demand and trouble finding truly qualified scientists...
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago

gras 9y ago

Why should I partake in moral outrage here? What makes this any worse than prefering younger employees at supermarkets because they can be paid less and are easier to control, even though they don't do as much useful work per capita?

xchaotic 9y ago

In the end if don't want to hire you, they won't. Now, rather than being brutally honest, they invent ways around it.

geofft 9y ago
I'm not sure that's true. If they don't want to hire you, they're less likely to, but at some point it might not be worth the effort to come up with an excuse. And, importantly for an organization, "they" might be a subset of people. If I have a biased coworker (where "biased" can be anything, but let's go with age for now) who doesn't want to hire someone, but can't communicate their dislike in email without putting animus towards a protected class in writing, and the rest of the team is mildly positive, the fact that they couldn't be brutally honest is probably enough to go from a no-hire (via the coworker's veto) to a hire.
- dvtv75 9y ago
  It is, in my experience, absolutely correct. About a decade back, I applied for a job in Dunedin. The manager of it met me, read my resume and loved it - I had plenty of experience where the other applicant he was interviewing didn't have any, he said, and queried what I knew about this and that, so on. He couldn't have been more positive. Then he asked if I had any medical problems, I told him I have a disability. The red started at his collar and worked his way up to his face. He made a point of going back to my resume, and loudly shouted at me for not having any relevant experience, how I'd fking wasted his time and he was going to bill me for it, that he was going to lay a formal complaint with the employment agency I had gone through. He lied through is teeth about their work for the city council, that he "ran the computer systems for them, all the servers," and that he didn't have time to teach me how computers worked, that I only had an academic qualification with no real world experience. (I knew a guy who was loosely involved with ITS for the DCC at the time, and he told me the interviewer is a liar, most of their IT support was in-house or specialist software support.) The interviewer also told me that I should get "real world experience running a corporate network," and he told me I could do that by stealing old computers and pirating Windows ("Well, there are ways to get Windows.") A few years later, I ran into a friend of mine from university who, it turned out, had got the job I missed out on. He was just out of university when they hired him, and actually had no experience in any roles of any sort. tl;dr: The interviewer lied to my face. It hindsight, it was obvious that he did, but at the time I didn't get it. (Part of the disability, I'm very easily lied to.) He made up every excuse under the sun to not hire me, or even continue with the interview. It would have been much less obvious (to an outsider) if he'd just concluded the interview normally, without any further comments on the disability and I wouldn't have been any the wiser, but he was too stupid and self-righteous for that. (Further thought, when I found out about it, I mentioned it to a friend of mine who immediately told me that the employer had every right to discriminate against me on the basis of my disability, and nothing could convince him otherwise - not even the government, who stated that had I found out sooner and been able to prove it, I would have likely received a large cash settlement.)

calt 9y ago

After my dad's manufacturing related engineering position moved overseas he got told by an automaker that he was over-qualified for line work. However no one was interested in his engineering skills even after he tried to pivot to quality-control engineering. The pay and work at the automaker would have been great for him. Instead he ended up carrying mail until retirement. I constantly think about him and remind myself to not get to comfortable in an industry.

expertentipp 9y ago
When I hear about getting too cosy in an automotive industry my brain screams "modern day Germany".
- Grollicus 9y ago
  Why is that? Automotive in Germany is generally a high pressure high turnaround job. If you're not at one of the big car manufacturers themseves chances are your employer has closed in 10 years, or fired 50% of their employees or something ridiculous like hat. Additionally, nowadays you don't get hired by car manufacturers but by third party companies that loan their workers to them. In the lower levels (factory work) there is some pushback against that, but in the higher levels its generally accepted
senatorobama 9y ago
> I constantly think about him and remind myself to not get to comfortable in an industry. What are the practical outcomes of this? Side projects?
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Keep learning new things. If you can't think of something substantial you've learned in the last year, switch something up. Start a company, give some talks, or switch jobs and industries if you have to.
- baxtr 9y ago
  Unsorted list of things you could do: Grow your network, read books and learn new stuff, get jobs with great sounding titles, get jobs, where you are exposed to key stakeholders in your industry, give talks, setup a „coffee date“ every other week (meet people for 30min, don’t ask for a job, just mention you’re always interested in oppurtunities to grow, they will reach out to you when something opens up).

salqadri 9y ago

This doesn't happen just because of age. While I was living in Canada, I met plenty of highly-qualified immigrants desperately looking for jobs, and would routinely get this response even though they weren't old or anything; its just that they would literally be applying for low-skill jobs because the appropriate jobs would not take them for lack of "Canadian Experience".

jpatokal 9y ago
This is a thing in Australia as well, and it's quite baffling. As far as I can tell, it's not even racism or genuine comms concerns etc, it's just that any work experience outside Australia gets discounted as "not real work".
- icelancer 9y ago
  >>it's not even racism >>work experience outside Australia gets discounted as "not real work". I mean, that might not be the strict definition of racism, but it essentially is.
  - derefr 9y ago
    This is still true even when the people getting discounted are of the same race and culture as the interviewer, though. Like, hospitals seemingly don't want doctors that grew up in the US but then studied medicine at foreign universities—even when those universities are world-renowned for producing great doctors. Unless you're suggesting that such places think that the foreign culture "contaminated" their own countrymen in the few years they were abroad—and made them useless—a different explanation is needed for this effect.
    - dpark 9y ago
      If you discount the quality of a degree from a well-regarded university just because it’s in a foreign country, it’s racist (or xenophobic or something roughly equivalent). Not against the candidate but against (citizens of) the nation hosting the university. With that said, I think hospitals want American candidates with degrees from American universities because the concern is that an American educated by a university in another country was perhaps unable to gain acceptance to an American school, in which case perhaps the foreign university isn’t actually as selective.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

The "traditional understanding" of getting an applicant to your job that is over qualified is that they are just trying to get a paycheck while they look for something better. I put that in quotes because yes, I've seen it also result in an age bias and as I went from one side of the equation to the other, I spent some time evaluating what was and was not important to me as an employee. About 15 years ago I came to the conclusion that "over qualified" was never a legitimate disqualifying disposition of a candidate. Simply put, if you are applying for a job that needs less skills than you bring and are willing to take the salary that is offered, how far 'beyond' the requirements you go is irrelevant. I asked a hiring manager at Google once if they would tell a sales guy "No I don't want the Ferrari at the same price as this Mazda Miata, its more sports car than I need to get around." Even if you never expect to challenge the top end of the sports car you probably won't turn it down. Similarly with employees, if you are up front with them about what the job entails and they are ok with it, who are you to say they will be "bored" or "twiddling their thumbs all day" ? Answer is, you aren't. Hire them and get get a discount on skilz they are offering you. Your company will be better for it.

trhway 9y ago
>"No I don't want the Ferrari at the same price as this Mazda Miata, its more sports car than I need to get around." Even if you never expect to challenge the top end of the sports car you probably won't turn it down. Ferrari comes with very high maintenance costs, well beyond what regular Miata buyer can comfortably afford. (note: age/experience wise i'm probably close to the "Ferrari" myself :)
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  That is true with the analogy. I personally haven't seen a correlation between qualification fit and maintenance challenges for employees but it sounds like enraged_camel has had different experiences. What I'm trying to tease apart are which are issues the manager causes and which are ones an over qualified employee would cause.
- madmulita 9y ago
  In that case, the problem is not overqualification, the problem is that the person is high maintenance.

shove 9y ago

I received some advice to omit the first 5-ish years positions from my resume and “reword” the line referring to my 20 years of industry experience. I'm older than my boss and it's definitely a bit scary. YMMV

Myrmornis 9y ago
What was the relationship between you and the person who gave that advice?
- shove 9y ago
  I was laid off and one of the severance benefits was a job placement / interview coaching service
kvonhorn 9y ago
I recently created a custom resume for a recruiter who wanted me to remove my pre-2006 experience from my resume before he would submit me for a contract. Boasting wide and deep experience in this industry is a liability for an employee, not an asset.
- shove 9y ago
  Yep, I did some “filtering” as well
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  This is funny to me because it means 10 years of experience is the maximum any candidate should have.
robteix 9y ago
I did this recently. I removed the details of older experience and replaced them with a section “Other projects” where I quickly listed interesting and relevant things I did before but with no dates. I also removed the dates of my degrees. Coincidence or not, I started receiving more contacts from recruiters and recently got a great new job.

WalterBright 9y ago

When your date dumps you after the first date, the reason they give is never the truth. It's the same when they reject you for the job. There's not much of a percentage in stewing or arguing about it.

humanrebar 9y ago
Agreed. I've heard candidates rejected as "overqualified" when they meant "not qualified or otherwise not interesting, but they seem to think a lot of themselves".
kbart 9y ago
Exactly. Saying "You are overqualified and would be bored to work here" is the same as saying: "You are really nice, but let's just be friends". Nobody today is going to tell you straight: "You are too old, sorry, we probably won't be able to push and exploit you and we are afraid you will find a better job".

blennon 9y ago

Now that I'm in a position of hiring technical people, this seems crazier than ever to me. It's hard to hire talented software engineers because they're so in demand. I would be glad to consider eager and talented prospective employees who I don't have to compete hard for.

alexnewman 9y ago

And people wonder why everyone goes for the startup lottery ticket

cyberferret 9y ago
Not sure why you were down voted here, but this is my EXACT rationale at the moment. I am a 50 year old programmer who sold his software consulting business a couple of years back. I figure the ONLY way I can stay actively programming these days is to buy a ticket in the good old "startup lottery". I've created 5 SaaS apps and around 10 mobile apps in the 3 years since I sold my business. Almost all the early ones struggled or failed completely. My current SaaS seems to be doing well, and I expect that it will see me through retirement. I guess I finally got lucky on a winning ticket :) I would expect a lot more players in this game as people age out of the software development world over the next few years.
- jlebrech 9y ago
  it's not 6 figure, but you can go from 5 figure to 5 figure jobs with no hassle.
  - alexnewman 9y ago
    Now i just need to figure out how to work from somewhere cheap enough I guess?
- alexnewman 9y ago
  I generally get voted down for anything I say negative. Hackernews just knows to vote down the surly.

pinewurst 9y ago

It's ironic seeing this hosted at Facebook, the land of "young people are just smarter".* *The infamous quote from Zuckerberg

CGamesPlay 9y ago
Well, Zuckerberg employs Beck, so he must have seen a sliver of the light at some point!
- cyberferret 9y ago
  I misread that as "silver light" and thought it was quite a clever pun on silver haired programmers... :)

musgrove 9y ago

I'm seeing this now. I'm 48 and have applied to over 100 jobs. I have an MBA and have been well-qualified for every one of the jobs I've applied to, or else I wouldn't have wasted my time. I've had about 5 legitimate responses. I know it's not my resume, or much else. Age is just about the only answer, or not being able to afford me because I'm "over-qualified" which makes me wonder why they're advertising for the position, if they don't expect to hire a qualified candidate.

CamelCaseName 9y ago
Is it possible they are inflating their needs in the expectation that applicants are inflating their resumes? I am 22 and see this all the time for positions needing 1-2 years experience. Plus, it is a great way for them to offer you a wage towards the lower end of the salary range while applicants feel happy getting a title they might not deserve.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  That, or a downstream effect of people applying for jobs for which they do not quite meet the stated qualifications. Putting up "5 years experience" starts being a really good way to get ambitious people who have two or three years of experience, and so employers start using the job description to grab those applicants rather than actually-meeting-qualification. On second thought, though, it's more likely due to H1B employment requiring an "attempt" to hire a qualified domestic employee. So once an employer has an H1B they want to hire, they have to put out a job description and fail to find an acceptable candidate meeting the listed qualifications.
  - bobsman123 9y ago
    This. My company creates fraudulent postings to hire H1Bs. The Americans we interview (1 per position to follow the law) are switching industries or otherwise have absolutely no experience.
    - vpalanc1 9y ago

jondubois 9y ago

It's true that if you always do the same kind of programming work, you might get bored and this can negatively affect productivity (in terms of raw speed)... But on the plus side; your code will likely be of very high quality and will almost definitely save the company a ton of money in the medium and long term. So yeah I think that calling someone 'overqualified' is a poor excuse. Startups love code monkeys that can churn out features quickly; they're often willing to sacrifice huge medium-term benefits for small short-term benefits but that's idiotic. From my experience, it only takes about 3 to 6 months for technical debt to become a major problem so unless you expect your startup to have an exit in the next 3 months then you really should not accept any short term solutions at all.

placebo 9y ago

I don't think you can fight this with laws: We live in an age and society that prefers young over old, smart over wise, quick profits over steady growth - I could go on with the contrasts but you get the idea. This might change over time but don't hold your breath. If some of the young developers reading this realize that the same might happen to them then my suggestion would be not to wait around hoping that new employment laws will save you in a few decades (which will pass faster than you think), but to start taking care of things now. This means, make sure that by the time you get to the age when someone won't hire you, you won't need or want to be hired. You can do this by either saving enough money by that age to do whatever you want (which could be a new venture doing what you love, whether it is developing software or not) or by slowly creating a business (maybe starting as a side project) which will end up with you on the hiring side (even if you only want to hire yourself).

abiox 9y ago

i was unemployed for a while, and got a number of 'overqualified' rejections. eventually i ran out of money to pay the bills, and was a few weeks from being kicked out onto the streets... when i finally managed to land something. it was a fucking brutal roller coaster. sure is nice to have a roof over my head.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

zappo2938 9y ago

Over-qualified people are seen as a threat. The managers who hire, unless they are the owners, do not want to deal with the office politics of someone who truly knows more than they do. If you are over-qualified for a position there is nothing wrong with playing down your resume. Writing code is a new career for me and I don't mention my previous management positions at all because I'm applying for subordinate positions framing my resume accordingly.

77pt77 9y ago
How old are you?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
I had a suggestion from a friend that I should just cut off everything from my résumé that happened before 7 years ago. I have not yet tried this, but my friend just started getting calls for interviews having done this. Do you have any more advice?
- zappo2938 9y ago
  I only put on my resume things that provide value to the potential employer. I was a chef in restaurants and on a yacht for 17 years before coding but on my resume, which is only one page, all that experience is included in 2 lines at the bottom because it doesn't show anything of value beyond my coding experience for the type of positions I was applying for. If I apply for a management position, my executive chef experience will take up a second page.
- gjmacd 9y ago
  This is what I was told as well. I'm 52, I have huge resume of experience at some great companies (even my own company I built), the reality is, you get 10 years in, the person thinks you're his or her "Dad"... it's a little shitty, but the advice I got was to do exactly this and I started getting more responses.

mirimir 9y ago

I've never liked being an employee. And I liked it less and less, as I got older. I also started getting rejected for being overqualified (plus having a bad attitude). My solution was consulting. And eventually, consulting as a testimonial expert. Being older and overqualified helps in intimidating opposing counsel, and impressing judges and juries.

AlexCoventry 9y ago
I like this route, too, so far, though it's new for me. I did meet a 60-year-old programmer the other night who said he can't find consulting work anymore. I do sort of worry about one day not being able to keep up with contemporary techniques, but it seems like that day is far off, for now.
- mirimir 9y ago
  I worked with a testimonial expert in his 80s, and he was getting ~1000 USD/hr.

ebfd 9y ago

Does rejecting a candidate for under-qualification not result in age bias as well?

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

"you're overqualified" and "we only hire the best" is a bit of a contradiction, isn't it?

Celarnor 9y ago

This is fascinating to see. I'm pushing 28, so every day I worry if the development job I have now will be my last. I'm a hard, dedicated, loyal worker who has never left a company, only swapping jobs when my old employers laid me off or themselves collapsed. Unfortunately, I suffer from strong social anxiety so management certainly isn't an option. When I was 22, finding a job was easy. But once you have the portfolio they say they were looking for in the first place, no one wants you anymore because they're too afraid you'll jump to the next job paying $1k a year more or whatever. Its dumb.

humanrebar 9y ago
I've never seen anyone reject a 28 year old as "overqualified". There's probably something else going on here, though I can't really help you with what it is. I suggest taking some of your technical friends out for some beverages of their choice and asking for some constructive criticism.
- Celarnor 9y ago
  Most of the people I know in tech feel like they're aging out of the market. Small web/marketing agencies--the only development jobs available around here--want fresh grads for junior positions. Most of the time those are the only ones available, as there is rarely more than 1 or 2 lead/senior developers within the company. I've never heard "you're overqualified" specifically, but I lost count of how many times I heard "we can't pay what someone with your skillset is worth and don't think you'll stick around because of it" when I was unemployed between jobs #3 and my current one for 5 months, desperately applying to any and all positions that got posted, like 'website maintenance assistant', 'adwords manager', 'forms developer' and 'frontend developer'. Eventually two weeks before my unemployment would have run out, a senior java ecommerce developer position opened up, to which I currently cling with dear life. :) This might just be regional/bad job market thing, I don't know. Never lived anywhere else but Maine.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Sorry to hear all that. Unfortunately, ability to relocate might be essential in some circumstances. At least until employers are more willing to hire remote workers, assuming that happens eventually.

Celarnor 9y ago

This is fascinating to see. I'm only two years away from the cliff (30), so every day I worry if the development job I have now will be my last. I'm a hard, dedicated, loyal worker who has never left a company, only swapping jobs when my old employers laid me off or themselves collapsed. Unfortunately, I suffer from strong social anxiety so management certainly isn't an option. When I was 22, finding a job was easy. But once you have the portfolio they say they were looking for in the first place, no one wants you anymore because they're too afraid you'll jump to the next job paying $1k a year more or whatever. Its dumb.

tomrod 9y ago

Reminds me somewhat of the Gervais principle. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

pb000 9y ago

So there could be a few more possibilities why an overqualified person is willing to accept the job. Maybe a burnout if very high pace high pressure work, could nsulting including. Perhaps chilling at the slower paced company is perfect for him or her. If so why would he leave? I have known plenty of folks who a really really want to mentor and contribute their experience from decades of consulting, but not necessarily go back to doing it. Why not take advantage of the fact. Also, from the employer's perspective give him or her opportunity to do something else when the jobbia done and there's time to spare. Opensource contribution on the clock, presales tasks maybe,speaking at conferences, mentorship. Who cares as long as his job is done, he feels needed and can find other things to do to not be bored. Does not take a lot to manage a self starter.

harry8 9y ago

This person has wonderful skills and experience. They must have an extensive network of people they've worked with and for. Yet here they are in front of me not making any use of that network. Why? Meet that head on because one possibility that goes through the mind of those making the hiring decision is "Is it because this person is horrible?" "I'm here and not using my own network to get hired because (they've all retired rich the lucky bastards|the network went a bit cold while I did 15 years in xyz co.|I'm not comfortable using a network because I've always been able to get hired on my talent, skills and work ethic and that's really important to me|whatever the reason is). Also when mentioning previous stuff you've done. "Did that with Jill and Amesh, great people, would work with them again in a heartbeat." "This one I did with Kar-Wai, talented guy, I liked working with him." Hiring is an investment decision you have to live with every day. Fear and greed the same as any other, allay the fears, stoke the greed. Note this is not "The Answer" my best to all doing it a bit tough in the job market. It's just one thing to consider if you haven't already, get the box next to it ticked.

neves 9y ago

Maybe you should look in places that management is based in evidences: https://hbr.org/2010/12/the-myth-of-the-overqualified-worker https://hbr.org/2010/12/the-myth-of-the-overqualified-worker

gjmacd 9y ago

I'm 52, I recently got a "pass" on a job that matched that I was told in person that I would get an offer in writing while at my 4th and final interview with the COO/HR person (not the hiring manager). I walked out of that place thinking I had the job only to get an email from the hiring manager (CTO) telling me that "if the job was a Venn Diagram, you fit 80% of the role, I just think the other 20%, you wouldn't be happy and probably not challenged enough." I was stunned. Venn Diagram?? come on man... Seriously? And email, call and talk to me. Be an adult. At first I was like "ok, not a fit." Then I had to realize I was probably 25 years older than he was and what he was really saying was "you're too old to be working here." The tone of his email was exactly as this blog. "You're just too experienced" -- in so many words. Sucks being old... But I replied in email that he was probably right, that the role itself was a little below my level (truth) and that it was probably something I would have had to work with him on. I also identified that this guy (great guy, I liked him), was immature on the management side and every co-worker that interviewed with me confirmed it by telling me how much "he needed someone under him to do be the leader, be the buffer -- keep him focused on vision", so they needed me -- or the younger me. So I felt confident this was going to work. But he clearly felt I was too old... It's a bummer. Had they offered me the job, I would have taken it and worked through the issues and grown with them. The reality is, I was perfect for the job and they actually needed my experience and my level of software domain knowledge in this space -- they were young, struggling with execution and accountability. I came to the realization that my age was both a benefit (to the company), but a threat to the CTO (founder) as being too experienced under you which would give him a lot of insecurity, but also having a guy that was old enough to be your Dad work under you -- he couldn't handle that (probably). Personally, for me, I would have had a blast. I love working with younger people and I love the energy and I'm someone who can relate to people half my age in many ways. Not to mention, I have all the modern stack experience they needed and I'm a pretty fucking great guy for their culture. So as a 52 year old developer, I never thought I'd say this, but I'm a dinosaur and I might have to end up being a consultant or building another company (again) -- which I did when I was in my 30's and young.

b0rsuk 9y ago

As an overqualified employee, I think you should simply delete parts of your resume to appear less skilled. A job is better than no job. I wonder why more people don't do that.

GavinMcG 9y ago
Gaps in your employment record probably look even worse, so that means carefully underselling yourself in each position. That seems tricky, at the very least. Also, selection bias might keep those stories from being told.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Not necessarily delete jobs you had. You can simplify the actual responsibilities and achievements you had. You trade potential higher salary for a higher chance of becoming employed. Later, you can ask for a rise. Disclaimer: I'm currently unemployed.
Mz 9y ago
Let me reframe this for you: Your resume should effectively communicate why you are qualified for this job. If you are essentially talking about being qualified to be in charge of the person with this job, you aren't really effectively communicating why they should hire you to fill this role. Both framings may result in the resume being edited down some, but the end result and positioning will likely be somewhat different. You aren't trying to downplay or hide anything. You just are trying to effectively communicate the information they need about you, no more and no less.

aryehof 9y ago

Part of the issue is that programming is largely seen today as a process of problem solving using an "agile" hack it 'till it works approach. Quick thinking to put out a fire or implement a quick feature using some new technology easily learned is most valued, along with the ability to be "flexible" when it comes to quality of work and workplace demands. Given this, one might as well look to recruit some smart, cheap and enthusiastic graduate. Sadly industry experience and lessons learned don't seem so important.

madshiva 9y ago

At my last interview, they reject me because "I'll not proper integrate with the team"

bryanrasmussen 9y ago

I had several interviews where the chief interviewer said I worry you won't want to keep doing just frontend, and I was like but if there are tickets on other parts of the stack I can do why wouldn't I - and anyway if I know parts of the backend and the data layer that means I know where a ticket should be fixed - most things can be fixed in the frontend but not everything should be. I didn't get those jobs though.

akerro 9y ago

My previous company was rejecting 95% of overqualified applications, sometimes because of their age, sometime because of number of their certifications in their CVs. There was once a time, the company was offering totally average daily wage for a contractor job, and we got a CV from a guy with almost every possible Java certification from last 15 years. We knew we can't hire him, he would be bored here and soon ask for more money, which the company didn't have.

amorphid 9y ago
> We knew we can't hire him, he would be bored here and soon ask for more money, which the company didn't have. I recommend giving anyone who appears minimally qualified the benefit of the doubt & see what they have to say before denying them a shot at meaningful employment. I used to run a recruiting company, and I couldn't afford to pay very much. For example, I hired my first assistant as $15/hour USD when I was paying myself $12/hour USD. This was in San Francisco, CA where a that kind of money doesn't go very far. Almost everyone I hired was overqualified, but that never seemed to matter. Before I hired anyone, I said something like... "Look, I can only afford to pay you $X, and you'll duties will be A, B, & C. You look like someone who could get a job that's half as hard & pays twice as much. Why do you really want THIS job?" If they gave what sounded like a sincere answer, I'd hire them. It was as simple as that. One of my applicants had an MBA from a fancy school and had worked in sales at a prestigious investment bank. When asked why the heck someone with that kind of background would want to do entry level office work that doesn't pay very well, the applicant plainly said, "My partner is starting a hedge fund, I help my partner with in bootstrapping the fund, I'm looking for a little extra money at a job with flexible hours, and I enjoy this kind of work." That "overqualified" applicant was hired, and turned out to be one of my best workers. When you pre-judge an applicant based on the appearance of too much experience & too many certifications, you are denying that applicant & yourself the opportunity to explore what could be an amazing employment relationship for both sides.

creatrixcordis 9y ago

Majority of managers do not want people that see through their bs. After all they need to manage. Someone who sees through their bs is not as pliable as an inexperienced hire. They want the naivety because it is exploitable just like ignorance. Remember most managers are trying to move up and if you pose a risk, they won’t have that. This is also part of the reason why there exist so many collaboration tools. If we placed collaboration above competition just maybe the company would be a better place to work. Instead of this competitive minefield where everyone is just looking for the next opportunity to step up at the expense of others and at the expense of collaboration.

le-mark 9y ago
These types are the easiest to game though. Just tell them what they want to hear, and deliver something occasionally. Then you're considered to be a star. Rinse, repeat.

DoubleGlazing 9y ago

I think the use of the term "over qualified" is often used to mask the real reasons for rejection. I was rejected for a job when I was aged 39 for supposedly being over qualified. When I applied for the job in question I was upfront about my experience, qualifications and desired salary which was market rate for my experience. I didn't sell myself short. The product I would be working on was unified message distribution system not too dissimilar to Twilio. After a code test, a whiteboard exam and two rounds of interviews I was told "Yeah, we really like you and you undoubtedly have the skills. But we were really looking for someone a little less qualified". I pushed a bit to find out what that meant and the HR person claimed it was my salary expectations, but I had my doubts. During both interviews I was asked if I had children. I said I had two. I was then asked their ages and where they went to school. This led on to questions about how they got to school and what happens if one or both of them are sick etc. The questioning style was casual, but they were definitely probing me. In Ireland this line of questioning is illegal, but it happens a lot. At the time I answered the questions with a feeling of reluctance. I do believe that having young children lost me the job. I was asked what would happen if my children were sick off school, I answered that either me or my wife would have to stay home. I was asked why my wife wouldn't take on that responsibility exclusively. I responded because we share our responsibilities to our family. I could see the interviewers brow furrow when I said that. I have a strong suspicion that the reason why age affects IT recruitment so much is not because of "over qualification". It's because the older you are the more likely you are to have family that you want to spend time with. Or if you don't have children you might have other interests that take priority over work. I've had managers who have straight up admitted that the older you are the less likely you are to put up with overtime and more likely to challenge over bearing bosses. Put simply younger people have fewer adult life distractions, will work longer hours and put up with more crap.

moduspol 9y ago
It sounds like you had expectations up front that you would be permitted to stay home from work if your kids were sick. If that's the case, it seems reasonable that your employer know about that before hiring you. They're likely asking because they've already hired people who expect to be able to come in late after taking their kids to school, work from home without notice if their kids are sick, etc. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but: To me that's reasonable employer's discretion. If they're expecting you to work after hours and probing if you have kids to gauge that, that's one thing. But I've seen coworkers get allowances for kids for all kinds of things. Both parties (employee and employer) should be aware of what the expectations are ahead of time. And if that means that I (as someone who doesn't have children, or lives near additional family who can handle those contingencies) come out as a better candidate, then that's not unreasonable.

monort 9y ago

When thinking about reasons for ageism you should account for consulting, which do not have this problem (or at least it is less pronounced). The cause is hidden in the overhead of full-time employment.

jordanpg 9y ago

Appearance matters so much in this discussion. There are 40 year-olds who are obviously 40 year-olds, complete with greying beards, burgeoning bellies, and a wardrobe consisting of nothing but polo shirts acquired from years of conference attendance. And then there are 40 year-olds who could pass for 30. My intuition is that the likelihood of ageism being subconsciously or otherwise invoked in the former case is vastly larger. In this sense, it is a lot like racism or sexism in the case of "culture" fitting. The desire to appear young and nimble, as a company, is a significant part of whatever demographic they are shooting for, outwardly.

walshemj 9y ago
Lol I am in my hem hem 50's some of my colleges though I was in my 30's recently :-)

unlmtd1 9y ago

Labor laws result in entrepreneurs rejecting 'over-qualified' applicants.

ausjke 9y ago

I want to buy a bag, just to hold my stuff, my budget is $100 for it, now the store has a few luxury bags for sale, but they are all above $200 price tag, what should I do? do I have to buy them? or I can decide to keep looking for better performance/price ratio? isn't over-qualify the same as too-inexperienced, that many companies are reluctant to hire? bias is part of the real world, while I'm not young anymore, I firmly support that the company has the right to hire who they want to hire, after all, it's its private money, its decision and we're not reaching communism just yet. It's the competition made USA USA.

bernardlunn 9y ago

ageism was the first ism I had to deal with personally, said the old white guy. It is bad in every industry and job sector.

odbol_ 9y ago

I've been rejected from jobs because I was over-qualified. Then I got accepted to one, which turned out later that I was over-qualified for that one too. I did get bored, I felt like the job wasn't a good match for my skills, and I went looking for a new job. So the concern is indeed very real and can cause unneeded churn for a company.

peternicky 9y ago

Can someone share a non-Facebook link please?